Excuses, excuses, excuses. In our Gospel today, we hear the Parable of the Great Feast and how so many of the people who were invited to this banquet came up with excuses to get out of attending. And honestly, the excuses weren’t even that great…they really weren’t good enough reasons to cancel. So, what’s the deeper meaning to the parable? Why does Jesus tell it?

If we look at this parable through a spiritual lens, the man who has hosted the banquet is God. He has invited His people to the banquet of Heaven but only through faith in His Son. Those who refused the invitation were the Israelites – most specifically, the scribes, Pharisees, and elders of the Jewish community. They had heard the witness of the prophets who told of the coming of the Messiah but remained unmoved by their message. Many of them even became openly hostile toward the prophets. As a result, God sent His Son and then Christ’s followers to bring the invitation to the Banquet to those who would believe – to the people who were unworthy: tax collectors, sinners, outcasts of society, and the Gentiles. So, the new Israel, the Christian community, is gathered and invited to the feast.

For each of us, this parable should be a challenge. How often does the Lord invite us to deeper faith in Him and we come up with excuses to get out of that? How often does the Lord ask us to do something for Him and we find excuses to not accomplish that task? The Lord asks us to spend time with Him and we say” “Oh, I’ll go to adoration tomorrow.” He might be asking us to get involved in a ministry and we say, “But that would mean I have to get to Mass early.” He might be asking us to be His hands and feet for someone less fortunate and we might say, “Oh, I don’t want to be inconvenienced.”

Each of us has already been invited to the Banquet. We have already been in attendance; but that doesn’t mean our journey of faith is over. We haven’t accomplished some goal; there is still more that the Lord is inviting us to do. Because just as the Lord found new guests for the Banquet as a result of the Israelites failure to recognize Him, He will not hesitate to do that again.

We are again being invited to accept Christ as the Lord of our hearts. So, as we go forth from Mass today, let’s ask the Lord to continue calling us to a deeper relationship with him, one that leads to a deeper sense of conversion. May the Holy Spirit give us the courage to respond, to attend each Eucharistic banquet with fervor, so that we can go out and be visible witnesses to our faith in Jesus so that others can also be invited to the great banquet of heaven.

Painting: Parable of the Great Banquet in the National Museum of Warsaw. Used under public domain license, Wikimedia Commons.